Young Men & Fire

On August 5, 1949, a crew of fifteen of the U.S. Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in Montana wilderness. Less than an hour later, all but three were dead or fatally burned in a blowup, an explosive 2,000 degree firestorm 300 feet deep and 200 feet tall. Winner of a 1992 National Book Critic Award, Young Men & Fire consumed fourteen years of Norman Maclean's life. He sifted through grief and controversy in search of the truth about the Mann Gulch tragedy, then wrote about it in excruciating detail. The sobering story of the worst disaster in the history of the Forest Service also embraces the themes of honor, death, compassion, rebirth, and the human spirit.

About the Author :
Norman Maclean grew up in and around Missoula, Montana, where he worked in logging camps and for the US Forest Service. He attended Dartmouth College and taught English for forty-six years at the University of Chicago. He began writing A River Runs Through It in his seventies at the request of his children. John Norman Maclean, a longtime Washington journalist and prizewinning author, has published several books on wildland fire, including one about the 2006 Esperanza Fire in Southern California. In order to provide an accurate account of what firefighters go through, he has spent over a decade working with them, taking their training classes, and listening to their personal stories, calling it the best job he's ever had. He resigned from the Chicago Tribune in 1995, after thirty years of working as a reporter and editor, to write Fire on the Mountain, a critically acclaimed account of the 1994 fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado, which took the lives of fourteen firefighters. The book, a national bestseller, received the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award for the best nonfiction book of 1999. A History Channel documentary based on Fire on the Mountain won the Cine Master's Award for Excellence as the best documentary of 2003.

Review :
"Young Men and Fire is a somber and poetic retelling of a tragic event. It is the pinnacle of smoke-jumping literature and a classic work of twentieth-century nonfiction." -- "Wall Street Journal" "Young Men and Fire is redolent of Melville. Just as the reader of Moby Dick comes to comprehend the monstrous entirety of the great white whale, so the reader of Young Men and Fire goes into the heart of the great red fire and comes out thoroughly informed. Don't hesitate to take the plunge." -- "Washington Post Book World" "A magnificent drama of writing, a tragedy that pays tribute to the dead and offers rescue to the living...Maclean's search for the truth, which becomes an exploration of his own mortality, is more compelling even than his journey into the heart of the fire. His description of the conflagration terrifies, but it is his battle with words, his effort to turn the story of the 13 men into tragedy that makes this book a classic." -- "New York Times Book Review" "A treasure: part detective story, part western, part tragedy, part elegy, and wholly eloquent ghost story in which the dead and the living join ranks cheerfully, if sometimes eerily, in a search for truth and the rest it brings." -- "Chicago Tribune" "An astonishing book. In compelling language, both homely and elegant, Young Men and Fire miraculously combines a fascinating primer on fires and firefighting, a powerful, breathtakingly real reconstruction of a tragedy, and a meditation on writing, grief and human character...Maclean's last book will stir your heart and haunt your memory." -- "USA Today"